Browse Items (63 total)

In 1771, Thomas Penn commissioned Benjamin West to memorialize the legendary treaty his father, William Penn, made in the early 1680s with the Lenape people indigenous to the region surrounding the Delaware River. The gesture was more than simply…

In 1771, Thomas Penn commissioned Benjamin West to memorialize the legendary treaty his father, William Penn, made in the early 1680s with the Lenape people indigenous to the region surrounding the Delaware River. The gesture was more than simply…

Located along the North Branch of the Susquehanna River, between Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, West Pittston (not surprisingly, due west of Pittston, just across the Susquehanna) lies at the heart of Wyoming Valley, a broad, crescent shaped lowland in…

George Washington was a great favorite with nineteenth-century printmakers. Most often he was depicted in the roles that endeared him to the American people: as a general in the Revolutionary War, as the first president of the United States, or as a…

From Picturesque Views of American Scenery.

This aquatint is one of twenty hand-colored prints that were engraved by John Hill after drawings by Joshua Shaw. They appeared in groups, or numbers, that were published in sequence under the title…

From the series North American Scenery

While the prospectus for North American Scenery called for “engravings printed in tints,” the sheets are in fact hand-colored lithographs. And although Whitefield would later become proficient in…

J. Thomas Williams was a photographer in York during the 1850s who, like most photographers of his day, employed the daguerreotype process, and not only to make portraits. Evidently in an attempt to break into the view making business, he brought…

Today a community with widely diversified industries, Williamsport was, from the time of its founding in 1795, and still in 1854 when John Bachelder created his drawing, a thriving lumber city. This view of Williamsport was sketched from the slopes…

The small town of Columbia, New Jersey, viewed here from the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River (looking north toward the Delaware Water Gap), was created by New York businessman Francis Myerhoff. In 1812, Myerhoff purchased the property and…

Although chartered in 1831, the Cumberland Valley Railroad Company didn’t complete its first span of track, between White Hill (just west of Harrisburg) and Carlisle, until August 1837. Service was extended further south to Chambersburg later that…